After the master has been running for a while (like 3 weeks) adding 6 new flume-nodes causes it to hang, then lose config on restart

Here's what happened to me:
0) Check the node statuses on the flume master, realize I'm missing 6 servers
1) Start up 6 brand new flume-nodes, point them at the flume master
2) log on to the master to configure them
– at this point I can't get a response from the master! I can connect via the shell, but every query I execute hangs. Browsing to the web dashboard hangs too.

3) "oh crap, no problem I can restart it"
4) restart the flume master
5) flume master comes back online, but it has lost EVERY configuration
6) I scramble to reconfigure every node using a ruby script

I realize I should probably have more than one master process, but all I did was add new nodes to the cluster!